Stephane Le Viet, founder and CEO of Work4Labs, a Facebook recruiting solution for companies of all sizes, spoke with AllFacebook about the launch of the Social Jobs Partnership app, calling it a “job aggregator” and saying that Facebook users will be able to search and view jobs by location, industry, type of work, keyword, category, subcategory, and whether the companies are veteran-friendly, as well as allowing them to apply directly via the social network. Le Viet added:

Looking for a job is one of the most social activities if you think about it. You talk to your families. You ask your friends to talk to their friends. It’s a natural evolution of what social is about. More social features (will be added to the Social Jobs Partnership app) down the road, making it a much more interactive experience from a candidate’s standpoint.

And Work4Labs discussed how Facebook’s sharing features will be used with the Social Jobs Partnership app in a white paper:

In addition to being one of the world’s largest job boards, the Social Jobs app includes Facebook’s innovative social sharing features, such as the option to like or share a post. Why is this so valuable? When a user chooses to like or share a job posting, that posting is then made visible to the user’s network, both on that user’s timeline and in his or her news feed. According to Facebook, its users share content an average of 3.2 billion times each day. If the average user has approximately 229 friends, and even a small fraction of those friends see, like, or share job postings, the app’s potential reach is exponential.

Nearly 18,000 companies currently use the Work4Labs platform, including about 20 percent of the Fortune 500.

How will Wednesday’s news impact LinkedIn? Earlier this week, we reported on a guest post on Pando Daily by Al Campa, CEO of social business app Reachable, in which he discussed how Facebook was narrowing the gap between it and LinkedIn, mainly due to time spent on the respective social networks, and this was before Wednesday’s announcement about the Social Jobs Partnership app. Campa wrote:

I think this is an inevitable trend. Facebook has become the center of many people’s online existence and their primary communication platform. User stats show that they spend hours each day on Facebook. LinkedIn is a place where people post their résumés and make a few business connections, but they only spend minutes per month there. This difference in time invested on the sites is why Facebook will ultimately displace LinkedIn as the default professional network.

We have heard from many of our customers that LinkedIn has several shortcomings as a source of connections. Due to the limited time users typically spend on the site, their LinkedIn networks can’t possibly represent everyone they know professionally. Most people don’t aggressively connect with co-workers and associates unless they are actively looking for a job. And those who do aggressively connect with others and accept every connection request wind up with a network of people they don’t really know, which does not help them when they attempt to use it.

Le Viet said in a press release announcing the Social Jobs Partnership app:

Today’s launch of the Social Jobs Partnership application highlights what we’ve known all along — that both recruiters and job seekers benefit when jobs are posted where candidates spend their time, and research overwhelmingly tells us that this is on Facebook. Undoubtedly, there will be an acceleration of the shift to social media as the primary channel to find a job with the extraordinary push of this consortium. We are fully committed to making the Social Jobs app on Facebook the best possible resource for connecting candidates and companies.

Social recruiting and social job seeking are standard practice in today’s job market, and Facebook has become one of the primary social destinations. Jobvite research shows that more than one-half of all companies now recruit through Facebook. As the pioneer of social recruiting, Jobvite is pleased to help our customers reach top talent through the Social Jobs Partnership. The Social Jobs Partnership is a major step forward in connecting employers and job seekers to help get Americans back to work.

DirectEmployers Association Executive Director Bill Warren added:

The launch of the Social Jobs Partnership’s job app on Facebook is a pivotal moment for the online recruiting industry. The new app positions the more than 1 million National Labor Exchange employment opportunities onto Facebook, a platform that is widely used by individuals globally, in order to gainfully make the transition to a new socially enabled recruiting model.

Readers: Do you think Wednesday’s introduction of the Social Jobs Partnership job board app on Facebook will have an impact on the country’s unemployment rate?